The described subject matter relates generally to powder metallurgy, and more specifically to additive manufacturing employing metal powders.
Current approaches for additive manufacturing (AM) processes employing metal powders use the powder either as received, degassed (typically under vacuum or inert gas), or passivated (usually by surface oxidation). These parts produced by AM often suffer from distortion, porosity, and quality inconsistency, resulting in limited adoption and high process waste.
Iron nanoparticles have been used in a liquid binder to facilitate improved part quality in certain three-dimensional printing mechanisms, but this approach has not been demonstrated in other materials. The liquid phase binder is also counterproductive in creating metallic components using powder bed and direct spray apparatus utilizing laser or electron beams to consolidate materials. Thus the use of nanoparticles in powder bed and direct spray apparatus have been limited to the addition of metal or carbon nanoparticles to thermoplastics. These nanoparticle-containing thermoplastics would need to operate as models for wax molds in which metallic parts are only formed indirectly (e.g., via casting).